The present disclosure relates to providing resource reservation quality of service (QoS) capabilities in a cloud-based computer environment utilizing a network virtualization overlay protocol.
Computer environments today support multiple types of data traffic that require different quality of service levels. A computer environment may be required to provide low-latency capabilities for critical network traffic, such as voice or streaming media, while also providing simple best-effort service to non-critical services such as web traffic or file transfers.
Two models that are used to support multiple QoS levels on computer environments are 1) Integrated Services (IntServ) and 2) Differentiated Services (DiffServ). IntServ provides a rich but more complex QoS solution by providing end-to-end signaling for each session (e.g., flow). DiffServ provides a relatively simple and coarse method of categorizing traffic into different classes and applying QoS parameters to those classes.
IntServ uses a Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) as a transport layer protocol designed to reserve resources across the computer environment for the integrated services. RSVP is a receiver-initiated setup of resource reservations for multicast or unicast data flows with scaling and robustness and may be used by hosts or routers to request or deliver specific levels of quality of service for application data streams or flows. To establish an RSVP session between entities, a first entity sends an RSVP path message to a second entity. The RSVP path message traverses through the computer environment to collect information pertaining to the path via traffic spec (Tspec). The second entity, in turn, sends an RSVP reserve message back to the first entity to confirm the reservation and commence transmitting data packets.
Computer environments have gravitated to cloud computing as a preferred computing environment due to its versatility over traditional computer environments. One aspect of a cloud-computing environment's versatility is its ability to support multiple tenants. To support multiple tenants, cloud-computing environments implement network virtualization overlay protocols, which provides each tenant its own address space that may overlap other tenants' address spaces. Network virtualization overlay protocols utilize packet encapsulation, and network virtualization over layer 3 (NVO3) is becoming one of the preferred protocols. NVO3 provides a tunnel technology that encapsulates layer 2 packets to the layer 3 layer and adds an overlay header to extend and divide needed address spaces. One of the prominent NVO3 protocols is Virtual eXtensible LAN (VXLAN), which extend the virtual LAN (VLAN) address space by adding a 24-bit segment ID to increase the number of available IDs.